Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens

Who Are We And Why Are We Here? This New Book Delivers One Hell Of An Answer

Who are we and why are we here? The answers to these two linked questions have formed the basis of just about every civilization that has walked the earth. Our art, our literature, our architecture, and our social obligations are in a sense mere tangents, or elaborations, on the central themes of Who and Why. In school, we learn the creation myths (defined as “things other people thought were true”) of remote and defunct cultures as a matter of course.

But what about us? What about the most (materially) sophisticated people the world has yet witnessed? The atom-splitters and the gene-sequencers, the rocket-builders and the moon-landers? Who do we think we are?

It is this apparent hole in our current cultural fabric that Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind seeks to mend. Implicit in his book’s reason-for-being is the idea that we have not yet harnessed our fantastical array of scientific findings and conclusions into a popular narrative, that we know our creation myth more as a negative (as can be seen in the furore over Christianity-derived “creationist” textbooks in the United States) than as a positive. Who are we and why are we here? What are the contemporary, scientifically informed answers to these questions?

Like all empires, humanity came from humble and marginal beginnings. On the savannahs of earliest memory, we were third-rate scavengers, devising our earliest tools so as to better crack open bones for marrow. As Harari points out, these tools are testaments to both our ingenuity and our crippling weakness. We needed that marrow because by the time we got to the carcass, the bones were all that was left. We didn’t have the strength to compete with the lions who hunted it, nor with the hyenas and jackals who arrived once the lions had their fill. We came for that which they discarded. Humanity began in the garbage.

From this point, of course, we ascended rather quickly. Suspiciously quickly, perhaps, for Harari claims that our “warp zone”-style progress from prey to predator has left us with some defining deformities: “Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually,” with the result being that “most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures.” According to Harari, “Sapiens, by contrast, is more like a banana-republic dictator […] full of fears and anxieties.”

So this is who we are: sly monkeys who worked an angle. But what an angle! Because from our weakness on the open plain — our slow, bipedal gait, our perfunctory teeth — we slowly accrued that array of strategies and tricks that now allow us to threaten the whole world and even ourselves with extinction. If this is a depressing distinction, perhaps that accounts for our paucity of anthropologically informed creation-poems, but one can still marvel at the persistence of that feeble prehistoric ape-man. I am reminded, in fact, of the film Carrie, in which the hated underdog emerges temporarily victorious, only to burn the place down…

But this is to depart into myths of myths. Though it is both impossible and undesirable for a review (and perhaps even for Harari’s book) to account for the entirety of our species’ history, suffice it to say that we emerge as the product of a series of successive “revolutions,” each of which both expanded our powers and drew us farther away from the natural world which spawned us. In this sense, Harari’s humanity is akin to German historian Oswald Spengler’s characterization of Western civilization as essentially “Faustian”; in Spengler’s view, Westerners are inclined toward making vast, blind, and potentially disastrous trades in exchange for new horizons. In Harari’s model, this is not only true of the West, but for all of us.

The first revolution was what Harari calls the Cognitive one. This is when our brains and their products — language, navigation, tool-making — expanded to their present stage. This is also when we established the primary use of these patterns, which is essentially to alter the world so as to better accommodate us, no matter what. There is a very interesting aside in which Harari discusses humans’ arrival to Australia some 45,000 years ago, which he calls “one of the most important events in history, at least as important as […] the expedition to the moon.”

Australia was important because when we arrived there we found a “strange universe of unknown creatures that included a 200-kilogram, two-meter kangaroo, and a marsupial lion as massive as a modern tiger.” There were also giant koalas and five-meter long snakes. Now, of course, this is no longer the case, and this is why Harari says that “the moment the first hunter-gatherer set foot on an Australian beach was the moment that Homo Sapiens […] became the deadliest species in the annals of planet earth.” It was in Australia that we learned how to fight to the death, to extinction.